Small Town Girl, I'll Bring the World to You

On Norma, Marilyn, Addison & Me

Marilyn, Addison

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” Marilyn Monroe coos, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Addison Rae, when asked in an interview clip how someone could win her heart, answers automatically. “Diamonds,” she says, turning to face the camera with a conspiratorial grin, her eyes lit up. “A girl can dream! Although I’m not always so shallow.”

She picked the profile writer for her recent Rolling Stone cover story up from the airport, playing Madonna and Marilyn and Charli on the car speakers as they pulled out of LAX.

The profiler notes that Rae has drawn an intentional connection between Marilyn’s Norma-Jean past and Rae’s own identity as a rising star — with her Louisiana roots, nullified Southern accent and bleached blonde hair.

The last time that I was in LA, I was waiting in line outside the popular Los Feliz brunch spot All Time when I spotted Addison standing in front of me.

It was a scorching hot day in October, the tops of my shoulders were pink and warm. A host came down the line, passing out rosé on a tray.

“Sure!” I said, tossing the mouthwash-sized cup back in a few short sips.

Addison was a foot ahead, sporting micro shorts, big sunglasses, freshly bleached blonde hair and a white fedora.

“No, thanks,” she said to the host cavalierly.

Classy, I thought.

I remember thinking how tiny she was, and how she radiated star power. She wasn’t smiling, she looked vaguely irritated.

“I’m still drunk from last night,” she moaned to her friends. In a back and forth with one about who got the most fucked up: “You were rolling more!” she lobbed, like a high schooler after a party. It was the VMA’s the night before, I remembered.

Her posse sat across from us at brunch, and I sneaked glances at her in between crunchy bites of salad. Her voice was deeper than the inflection she uses in red carpet interviews, more grounded, serious, hungover.

“I'm just living that life/ While you're sitting in your dad's basement,” she says like an eye roll on her “Von Dutch” remix with Charli XCX.

I listen to this line in my earbuds walking down the street, reminded of the people from past places that felt like home, whose opinions once mattered so much, and now don’t at all. The soft exhale at that, the relief of memories tidily tucked away, without any use now. It’s like that line from Mad Men, when Don says to the kid in the elevator, “I don’t think about you at all.” But we do sometimes, in passing thought; a lyric in the back of the car when you’re heading to the party, running on the treadmill towards nothing, typing away on your laptop at your desk, working towards something.

Addison has scrubbed the Louisiana twang from her voice, her inflection is light and high in the clouds now — like Britney Spears, her fellow Southern girl. She’s a girl I’d love to dance with in a big group, partying until dawn at trashy clubs just for fun, spinning in circles, Young Hearts Run Free.

The concept of a woman as an icon for being an icon tends to negate the work it takes to get there, posing the transformation as a magical step without hard work and sacrifice. It’s not right, but it’s okay, Whitney Houston sings, I’m going to make it anyway. This is nothing new. Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth. Actresses known for their looks and presence and relationships more than their talent.

In the Rolling Stone cover story, Charli said that everything Addison does in the public eye is for “her art.” She reads Britney’s memoir walking down the street, and Daily Mail articles drop about how she’s vying to play Britney in the rumoured biopic. She poses with a seashell on the red carpet to promote her latest single “Aquamarine” and posts Disney quotes on her Instagram stories like a modern Marilyn.

I remember being eleven or some age like that, staring out my childhood bedroom window, looking out over the river and the green farm fields, seeing future dreams behind my eyes. A small town girl with a secret.

“A dream is a wish your heart makes,” a line from Cinderella.

And remember in Anora, when Ani’s friend at the strip club says: “If you were a princess, you’d be Cinderella.” She’s walking in stride with Ani, who’s on her way out of the club for “good,” about to move in with her millionaire Russian husband in his Jersey mansion.

“YES Cinderella!” Anora squeals. “You know me so well.”

“Any man who I ever thought would save me hasn’t,” someone said to me once. I remember being 21, curled up on the cold kitchen floor, crying over the phone to the boy I liked, begging him to come over because I was feeling something too big for me. This is not an uncommon recollection.

I forgot about My Dreams until the summer before last. Before, there was red wine and sleepless nights and small town inflections that came out every now and then, the feeling of pretending in every room I was in. I think this is just being 23, to be frank. Caught in between here and there, holding onto Cinderella dreams.

I started writing about anything, like I did when I was a kid, things that I thought didn’t matter to anyone else, but mean so much to me. Memories I turn over and over, celebrity memoirs I devour, philosophies from lecture halls I think about often.

Working towards The Dream is a drug better than any crush. No matter how good the eye contact feels, sitting on his lap sipping Diet Pepsi. Curating an aesthetic and creating your own world to live within, like Addison, is a dream come true.

In the Dream I’m on a plane, hurtling in a cab over the Brooklyn Bridge, writing in a coffeeshop on a Tuesday, waking up in Toronto to sun streaming in through my big bedroom window in the morning. A fairytale I’ve prayed for, through work and luck and delusion and dreaming.

In Hollywood, cameras flash, and in paparazzi pics I see the girl on the high school cheerleading team in Addison now. She’s walking down the Boulevard in fishnet tights and a seashell bra, covering her face with her hand: the world is her oyster.

The other night, the girls and I drove fast down Dundas, “Aquamarine” blaring on the speakers, the car thrumming with heavy vibrations. Give me — ooo oooh, oo ooh, Addison cood.

The ones who “make it:” Addison, my friends, all the city girls I know who moved away from a smaller place to somewhere greater, wanting more. In the Dream driving fast, bright lights flying by out the car window at night, dark roads, faster now, speeding off below the bridge, the underpass, until you’re through —